Well, you can imagine my reaction (on top of the fact that I was watching a movie called “Mosquito Man“) when the first thing I see upon starting the disc was the NuImage logo. At that point, I felt the crushing inevitability of the phrase ‘Mosquito Man sucks’ popping up in the review, which naturally filled me with self-loathing.
Weirdly, though, the film didn’t suck. Huh. I mean, we’re obviously not talking Citizen Kane here, but strangely enough, the film pretty much delivered about as good a fulfillment of its title as one could reasonably expect.
So, anyway, we inauspiciously begin by heavily ripping off Mimic. A mosquito-borne virus is killing zillions of people, and scientist Jennifer Allen is attempting to genetically engineer a mosquito that will for some reason replace the bad mosquitoes…well, it didn’t make such sense. Mimic, frankly, covered this ground a lot more intelligently.
So the eee-vil head of her team, so is only interested in profits (sigh), brings in a death row inmate to covertly conduct human testing upon. Is that ever a good idea? He escapes, and several gunfights ensue, and in a resultant explosion he is caught in a radioactive cloud of genetically altered mosquito guts.
Here the film begins to rip off Cronenberg’s The Fly…wait, I’m not making this sound very good, am I? Despite my earlier assurances. (And I haven’t even mentioned that the hero is played by Corin “Raging Sharks” Nemec yet, although to be fair he’s a lot better here than in that ‘movie.’)
So what makes this a surprisingly decent Man-Mosquito movie, in my opinion? Well, following this point we get a whole hell of a lot of monster action. Since Mansquito (the alternate title, and a much funnier one) is a guy in a suit, it doesn’t cost much extra to feature him a lot. In fact, probably because the suit is pretty nifty, they perhaps feature him a little too much. That may just be my old school preference for mood, however, and modern audience members probably don’t mind the constant monster close-ups.
Anyway, Mansquito kills about a thousand people in this movie, and several in spectacularly gory fashion, so if that’s your bag you’ll definitely dig this. Of course, an old hand like Roger Corman would have thrown in some gratuitous naked boobies, too, but except on that front this is everything a low budget video rental can be expected to deliver.
There are some bits too unbelievable even for a movie like this, though. First of all, Mansquito is bulletproof for some reason (??), probably just because they wanted him to slaughter like three dozen wildly firing cops, as he indeed does late in the picture. Second, and even more goofily, he eventually manifests wings and flies around. Uh, yeah, well, if actual mosquitoes were six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds, they wouldn’t fly either.
Still and all, worth a look, despite the dumb parts. Next week, meanwhile, sees the Shark Man movie Hammerhead coming out.
Good times.
